


When You Lay Your Burdens Down

by Lynzee005



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: F/M, Falling In Love, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to Assault, Soulmate AU, Spoilers for The Return, post-Return, post-S3, soulmate voices, voices in your head
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 07:23:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11984997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lynzee005/pseuds/Lynzee005
Summary: If now isn't the time to admit she's your soulmate, then when?





	When You Lay Your Burdens Down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RedemptionByFire (steelneena)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/steelneena/gifts).



> My first soulmate AU. I totally blame Eileen for this...
> 
> Definitely spoilers up until Part 16 of The Return. References to drugs and assault. The second half takes place after the finale, and is but one of about a billion possible scenarios for how this could all work out for them.
> 
> Title borrowed from a line in the song "The Best Thing" by Doveman. Songs are suggestions. They're what I listened to when I was writing it. I hope you enjoy.

  
  
In a bed scarcely wide enough for one but accommodating two, beneath sheets that smell of the cedar-lined closet in which they’d been stored, with nothing but the sound of the rain on the shingles and her steady, even breaths in his ears, Dale Cooper relaxes into the pillow behind his neck for the first time all night and watches Audrey Horne sleep. 

Dale hasn’t asked why there is a bed — even one as small as this — in a place called the Bookhouse, but he suspects that it is for all the reasons one might expect from an organization comprised of daredevil types with motorcycles and hot rods to go along with their beautiful wives and girlfriends, but the kind of guys who’d spend more nights in their respective doghouses than not and would thus need a place to crash from time to time. Regardless of the answer, Dale isn’t complaining. On this night, the only person in the world who matters to him is sleeping off a near-lethal drug overdose with the combined help of prescription opioid agonists and mild sedatives, and she’s asked him to stay, so he’s staying. 

Eight hours have elapsed since he carried her away from One Eyed Jack’s, helpless to reverse the course of the days she’d been missing and cursing himself for the foolishness that led them here. If only he’d found her note, he chastised himself. If only he’d put the pieces together sooner. If only he’d been paying closer attention instead of keeping her at arm’s length out of fear that something bad was going to happen to her...and then being oblivious when something bad _did_ happen. 

_ It’s over now _ , he thinks, feeling his anxiety leave his body through a sigh that sends a curled tendril of Audrey’s hair dancing against her skin. She frowns in her sleep and he freezes, fearful of waking her prematurely; he doesn’t move, doesn’t dare to even breathe, and only when several seconds have passed does he close his eyes to thank his stars.

So much of this night has been outside of his control that now, beneath the Bookhouse roof, he doesn’t know what to do with the exacting amount of control he has. No one is permitted to enter without his say-so; all phone calls are to go to him; the thermostat is to stay exactly where he’d put it; the men at the door and the men out back and the men in the parking lot report to him.

He craves control. He needs it like oxygen. It is the only thing that makes sense to him, in a world gone absolutely mad, where drugging an innocent young woman with heroin is seen as an acceptable means to an end... 

Dale opens his eyes and startles when he sees Audrey, her own eyes half-open, bleary and dazed, but coming to presence. She manages a smile, one he returns, then labours to roll over to face him fully. All thoughts bend to her as the cares of the outside world drop away like rain trails on the window. 

“Careful,” he whispers to her, reaching a hand out to steady her. The sheets rustle as she move, slowly, until she is on her right shoulder. 

“Hi,” she whispers. 

“Hi.”

Audrey lets out a breath, and more errant strands of hair fall across her face. She frowns. “You stayed.”

Cooper still has his hand on her shoulder; his fingers are inches from her face. Without thinking, he brushes the hair back behind her ear. Her skin is damp, clammy; he entirely expects it to be at this stage of her detox. He lets his fingertips rest against the tip of her earlobe. 

“You asked me to.”

She closes her eyes and seems to smile. “I know.”

Cooper keeps his hand next to her face, turning his hand over and pressing the backs of his fingers to her cheekbone now, feeling the heat radiating from her skin. He wonders how much of all this she will remember in the morning. “Do you need anything?”

Audrey’s soft sigh and crinkled brow precede the shake of her head. “No, I’m okay,” she whispers. 

He wants to accept what she’s said but can’t. “Water?” he presses. “Coffee?”  _ Coffee? What an asinine idea...  _ “I can phone down to the sheriff’s station, see what they have — ”

“Talk to me?”

It is the simplest request and it shatters his heart. He strokes her face. “What do you want me to say?”

“Anything,” she whispers, squeezing her eyes tight. “I just...just talk to me.”

Cooper inhales, exhales — twice — and then proceed to recite the FBI Oath of Allegiance, because it is the only thing he can think of: “I, Dale Bartholomew Cooper, do solemnly swear that that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic...”  _ Including Canadian drug smugglers...brothel-keepers...kidnappers...”  _ That I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same...” he swallows. “That I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion...and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.”  _ Well and faithfully... _ he cringes, seeing the dark circles beneath her eyes and knowing he is the reason they’d been put there. One again, he gulps. “So help me God.”

“They sound like wedding vows,” she whispers. “Agent Cooper? Have you ever been married?”

“No.”

“Do you want to get married?”

_ Very much _ , he thinks but “One day,” is what he says.

“Me too,” she replies. “One day...I’ll wear a pretty dress and I’ll walk down the aisle and someone tall and dark and handsome will be waiting for me at the end and he’ll give me his name and take me away from all of this...”

Her breath catches in her throat and her eyes shoot open; one hand flies to her face and she grasps for his fingers, holding tightly.

“What’s wrong?”

Wild eyes search the room before landing on his face. “Where am I?”

He strokes his thumb across her knuckles. “You’re in the Bookhouse. You’re safe.”

“I thought I was falling.”

Cooper shakes his head. “You’re not falling. I won’t let you fall, I promise...” he trails off. “I’m right here, Audrey.”

Her pupils are fear-blown, eyes wide as saucers. “You won’t leave?” she begs.

He grips her fingers. “I won’t leave. I promise you...I won’t leave.”

Audrey sighs, relaxes, and shuts her eyes once more; she still grips his hand in hers. “The room is spinning but when I close my eyes, it stops,” she says. “I’m in the Bookhouse. I’m laying in bed in the Bookhouse and you’re Dale Bartholomew Cooper...” she trails off. “Your middle name is Bartholomew.”

“Since the day I was born.”

“My middle name is Sylvia,” she says, eyes squeezed so tightly her eyelids drain of colour. “After my mother.”

Cooper strokes his thumb across her knuckles.

“My initials spell ASH. Ash...” she continues. “Burn me up, and all that’s left is A-S-H.”

“Audrey?”

She’s fighting tears and her own fear. “Please keep talking?”

He nods and feels her fingertips flex against his, then begins reciting the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America. “We the People of the United States of America, in order to form a more perfect union...”

He makes it to the middle of Article 1, Section 2 when he notices that Audrey seems to have drifted back to sleep — her eyelids are relaxed, her breathing has evened — so he lets his voice wane until nothing but the patter of rain fills the cabin once more.

It’ll be morning soon. The sun will be up and the town will rise and the world will keep spinning but for Audrey nothing will ever be the same. He doesn’t know how to fix that. He knows, deep down, he just can’t.

But for now, he does what he  _ can _ . He gets comfortable. He relaxes his suddenly tense shoulders. He doesn’t try to remove his hand from hers but lets it rest against the pillow in the path of her warm, exhaled breath. He knows he should get some sleep, and thinks now would be the best time, but as he closes his eyes her voice breaks through the still silence.

“I hear your voice in my head.”

“My voice?” he asks.

She nods slowly. “When I was there — maybe it was what they did, what they gave me — but when I was there, I kept hearing your voice,” she speaks, her own voice barely a hair louder than the rain. Cooper struggles to hear her. “And every time I heard it, I thought — I thought it meant you were actually there, that you’d made it, that you were going to help me...”

Cooper feels his heart sink in his chest. “I’m so sorry, Audrey,” he tells her. “I’m so sorry it wasn’t me all those times.”

Audrey’s eyes flash open. “But you  _ did _ come for me. You  _ were _ there.”

“Not soon enough.”

“You don’t understand,” she says, squeezing his hand in hers. “You’ve  _ always _ been there.”

She’s right: he doesn’t understand. “Audrey, I—”

Audrey continues, cutting him off. “I didn’t know it at the time, not until I went up there. But ever since I was little...see, I didn’t realize it until the first time I met you, but...your voice...it’s just...”

“What do you mean ever since you were little?”

Audrey’s eyes are closed again, her lashes resting against her skin. “I mean that when I was a little girl, and I would count in my head, it was never  _ my  _ voice. Never. Not once.” She takes a breath. “When I’d read stories to myself, whenever I’d be thinking about something, working through a problem, trying to figure out what I should or shouldn’t do. Or sometimes...sometimes just out of nowhere, lovely little things. ‘You’re going to do well on this test’ or ‘That was a really nice thing to say’ or ‘You have a lovely singing voice.’” 

She pulls the corner of her bottom lip between her teeth and chews on it for a half-second. “I thought it was normal. It was the only thing I knew, really. So I wrote a story about it once for class though and my teacher asked me to explain what I mean. So I did. I think she thought I was crazy or something. And at first she said I shouldn’t live in my head so much, and then questions like that wouldn’t trouble me, and that when I did the voice would disappear,” she says, frowning. “But I didn’t  _ want  _ the voice to disappear. Do you understand? I wanted to have it with me, always. So I never told anyone else about it until...”

Audrey trails off and Cooper squeezes her hand. “Until?”

She takes a breath, and her chest shudders as it expands to contain the words she’s about to speak. “Until that morning at breakfast,” she whispers finally. “When I first heard you speak. It was like I’d dreamed you into life, the face to match the voice I’d always had with me. I didn’t want to let you out of my sight, because it was too good to be true, to have this perfect thing happen to  _ me _ . Nothing perfect ever happens to me...”

She sighs, and the hairs on the back of Cooper’s fingers stand on end. “I just wanted you to see me,” she says, as her voice began to taper off once more. “I hoped maybe if you heard my voice enough then it would be in your head the same as yours was in mine...”

Audrey is falling asleep again, just as the first of the morning birds begin their song outside the window in the misty, pastel pre-dawn. Cooper is desperate for answers but he can’t wake her, can’t trouble her for this, so he let’s her sleep as his mind whirrs, back to his childhood, to conversations with his mother, revelations about the inner workings of the universe... 

_“When you meet your soulmate, you’ll discover that it’s their voice that’s been in your head your whole life. And, Dale, that’s how you’ll know...When you tell them who they are to you, and if they tell you the same, the voices disappear. That’s how you know. That’s how I knew._  

Fear clutches at his heart and pulls him away from the moment, spinning him out of control as he fights to find a way out of the situation he’d been put in. It was a most inconvenient truth he was facing, and he wants nothing more now than to put it behind him, to close this chapter of his life and go as far away as he can, to spare her the hurt and agony that is as sure to follow this as night follows day.

But he knows.

He’s spent his whole life searching for the owner of the voice in his head. He’d never had any idea what he’d do if he found her. Once upon a time, he’d imagined himself proposing on the spot the moment he met her. But once the impulsiveness of youth had been tempered, he’d figured it would be prosaic and uncomplicated, the way all the best romances were: he’d find her, they’d fall in love and, together, carve out a simple life together. 

Every woman he’d ever loved had been hurt, had been touched by the evil that had followed him since boyhood, and none of them had been the woman his mother had told him about. What would happen when he met that woman? The one whose voice lived within his head? How badly would that hurt them both? 

And whenever he carried that to its natural conclusion, he arrived at the same question, unanswerable in its cruelty: What would happen when evil found her, touched her, claimed her the way it had all the others?   
  
He doesn’t want to think on it. Not here. Not lying next to  _ her... _

Because, of course, in imagining the conversation with his mother, it isn’t  _ his mother’s _ voice that he is hearing — though, my god, does he want it to be; he’d give anything to hear her speak one more time. It isn’t hers, and it isn’t Caroline’s, and it isn’t any other woman he’d ever fancied himself in love with.

It's Audrey’s.

It has  _ always _ been Audrey’s.

He is six inches away from his soulmate, who hears his voice in her head too, and the only thing he can think of is that he’s promised never to leave and now he knows there’s no way he can stay.

 

* * *

 

 

Agent Cooper is understandably and justifiably angry about it all, but he can’t show it. Even if he could, he wouldn’t; it’s not his nature. He will reach out to everyone first, make sure they’re okay, and if there’s time left in the day (and there rarely is) he’ll indulge in a little catharsis: maybe a good cry, maybe yelling into a pillow, maybe staring out the window. 

He’s run out of people to check on though. Soon he’ll have no choice but to address this. Maybe that’s why he’s put this last one off. Everyone else is taken care of. His friends in Las Vegas — Dougie’s friends, his coworkers, his wife and child, the people who helped him grow and become whole once more and whom he can never, ever see again — and the people he (no, it wasn’t him — not completely, not _really_ ) left behind all those years ago without a trace. Everyone in Twin Peaks, from the Double R to the Sheriff’s Department to the Great Northern Hotel... 

Except for this one, last visit.

He’s saved it for last not out of any sense of dramatic tension — this isn’t some scripted soap opera — but rather out of a deep and abiding sense of concern for her, her well-being, her sense of self, and out of respect for her pain. Pain he knows he is responsible for causing. 

If he’d been brave enough to face her instead of running away, to have taken her at her word and listened to his own wants for once instead of pushing them aside in favour of what was  _ right _ ...if only he’d done that, had fought for her when he could have...

But no. All of this may still have happened. There is simply no way of knowing, and griping about it now won’t change it. He can only go forward, make amends, and move on as best he can.

And hope she can do the same.

So he stands outside her room at the Great Northern, unannounced but welcome all the same, greeted warmly by the nurse stationed outside her door, whose shift is nearly over. He coughs lightly into his closed fist, shifts his weight from one foot to the other, and smoothes his hair back against the side of his head. The paper wrapping around the small bouquet of flowers in his hand crinkles as he stands there.

He has no idea what he’ll say. He can’t even attempt to predict what she’ll say. He desperately wishes he hadn’t brought flowers. 

“Just knock,” the nurse coos. “She’ll be up now.”

He clears his throat and nods in thanks, raises his closed fist to the door, hesitates. The three soft raps his knuckles eventually make on the wood barely register, but they’re enough to push open the door, which wasn’t latched tight. It creaks open slightly, and his heart skips a beat. He peers into the dimness beyond and waits for inevitability to crash down on him.

“Hello?” he asks. 

No reply.

He turns back to the nurse and she nods, gestures for him to go in. It doesn’t feel altogether right, but he’s stuck in the awkward middle, and reasons that the door will stay open, and the nurse will be right there, and — after all — he’s just there to see how she is...

He gulps, takes a step, pushes the door open a little more.

The curtains are drawn, and in the relative darkness his eyes take their time adjusting. With cautious footing he steps across the threshold and takes three small strides into the room, and only when several long seconds have elapsed does he recognize her leaning against the windowsill in front of the heavy brocade fabric that hangs there, her pale blue housecoat wrapped around her shuddering shoulders as she sobs.

At first he wonders if she’s hurt herself. But he sees her rocking, and in a moment of fury, she claps her hands over her ears. She’s muttering to herself.

“Just stop it...” she says. “Just stop...go away...just go away...”

He stops dead in his tracks. “I’m sorry, I’ll leave—”

But she’s not talking to him. She doesn’t look up, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t react in any way. She doesn’t seem to know he’s there.

“I need you,” she whispers. “I need you here. Where are you? Special Agent, where are you?” 

He hears her name for him — a long-ago moniker born out of what he thought was girlish attachment but which he knows better than to dismiss now — and his blood goes cold and he wonders what his next move ought to be.

_ Talk to her _ , her voice — the same voice that’s always been there, since he was a small child — whispers to him in his head.  _ Tell her you’re here… _

So he does.

“I’m here.”

Audrey’s hand flies to her throat. 

“What?” she asks, breathless.

“I’m so sorry...”

She hangs her head as the tears begin anew and braces herself against the windowsill. Shrouded in darkness, she weeps silently. He notices her legs shaking, starting to give out. 

She repeats her thoughts as she starts to sink to the floor as gently as she can.. “I need you here...so badly...”

He steps behind her and helps her to hold steady. “I’m here.”

“Where?” she begs, her ragged voice catching on a sob and pulling half her heart along with it as it rips from her throat.

Still, she doesn’t seem to register the reality of this moment. He doesn’t blame her. Twenty five years were taken from her, too; but she had it much worse than he did.

Softly, calmly, he squeezes reassurance into her shoulders.

“Audrey, I’m right here.”

Audrey doesn’t turn or move except to lean back, barely, until she feels herself press against him. Her skin is warm beneath the flannel robe. She smells faintly of fabric softener, of roses. She’s so much more real than he ever thought she could be, all those years that he lived with only the sound of her voice in his head. 

But he’s filled with uncertainty. Once she turns around, it will be decided; she’ll either know him or she won’t. She’ll recognize him as the man he was and will strive to be once again, or she’ll recognize him as the monster who violated her, who took her life from her.

He wants to disappear. He wants a do-over.

And when she finally does turn to look at him, he freezes, panic rising in his throat as he steels himself for the confrontation. It’s written on her face. She just knows. It’s him. 

It’s not  _ Him _ . Not the monster.

It’s the  _ real  _ him.

He’s flooded with relief.

“You found me,” Audrey whispers.

He nods. “I did.”

“You  _ saved  _ me.”

“I’m so sorry it took me so long, Audrey,” he tells her. “I was trapped too, at first. But as soon as I knew where you were...”

She touches his face with light fingers, traces the lines that have etched into his skin since that first day. He knows he’s older, he’s seen himself in the mirror. And as she whispers across his face, he takes the time to study hers, and finds it as beautiful as the last time he saw it. Softer. Older too. Wearier. Sadder and more haunted. He knows then that he would give anything in the world to make her smile.

_ That’s not your job _ , her voice in his head speaks to him.  _ For all you know, she’ll never let you near her again… _

He remembers everything, in bits and pieces for the most part, and he’s dealing with it day by day. Right now, he’s trying hard to forget what his hands did to her when he wasn’t in control of them any longer. What words did he speak to her? What sounds came from his mouth? Laughter? Menace? 

Cooper looks into her eyes and knows that she remembers. But she doesn’t look away.

He leans into her fingertips and she presses her hand against his cheek. “I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t you.” He has to read her lips, the words are so quiet.

But part of Cooper knows different. Part of Cooper knows that it was  _ part of him all along _ , half of who he was. Pure evil with unfettered access to the desires he’d once kept buried so deep inside, the things he was so afraid of.

Evil _had_ found her. Evil had read his heart and heard her voice and sought her out and made her pay, because he hadn't been paying attention once again. 

_ This was all his fault _ .

“Audrey,” he chokes on her name, like it doesn’t belong in his mouth and his lips and teeth know it and spit it out before he corrupts it. He can’t look her in the eyes, but he tries again to speak. “You don’t understand...”

She nods. “Yes I do. I knew it wasn’t you the whole time,” she tells him plainly. “He had your face. He had your hands. He had your voice...”

Her words punch a hole through his sternum and all the air leaves his lungs on account.  _ Of course _ , he gasps.  _ Your voice. The same voice. In her head all these years... _

“All along, the voice... _ my _ voice...”

“Yes...” she says, and he winces as tears fill his eyes, because it’s true: the voice she’d claimed to love, the one that comforted her all those years, has sat tainted between her ears for twenty five years now and there’s nothing either of them can do to stop it except to persevere and hope for the best and...

“But I knew it wasn’t you,” she says. “I knew it  _ couldn’t  _ be you...”

He scoops his hand along her jaw. “I never should have let you go,” he tells her, combing her hair behind her ear with alarming desperation. “All those years ago, when you first told me...”

He trails off. He’s in agony, fraught with his own anxiety, and he can’t say a word. She grabs him on either side of his face and forces him to look at her. 

“Tell me.”

“In the Bookhouse,” he says, finally finding his voice. “The night I brought you back.” He clears his throat. “The night I brought you back the first time...”

She nods, but he can tell that the memory is faded and hard to access. “That was twenty five years ago, what has that got to do with—”

“I hear it too.”

It takes a minute, but eventually she registers his words. Her eyes widen in shock, and her grip on his face loosens as she brings one hand up to her ear, slapping it gently with the flatness of her fingers.

“Oh my god,” she whispers. “It’s gone...y-your voice...it’s gone!” 

For a moment time stands still, and he wants to smile, to tell her it’s supposed to be like that, but she balls her hands into fists and beats them against his chest, his shoulders.

He reaches up to still her. She rails against him even harder. 

“What did you do?” she cries. “Bring it back!  _ I want it back _ !”

“Audrey,” his voice is calm, even, not because he feels calm or even but because  _ it has to be _ . Because  _ she needs it to be _ . 

For the first time in decades, he hears his mother’s voice — not Audrey’s voice anymore; that voice no longer needs to occupy his mind, not when she’s standing there in front of him and he sees her for the first time, truly, in his life — his mother’s voice in his head, telling him what to say. Tears cloud his throat. 

“The voice you hear in your head is  _ supposed _ to go away when you meet your soulmate.”

It seems like her anger blocks his words and several seconds elapse where she makes no move, not even to breathe. Eventually, slowly, she relaxes her fists, and his grip on her wrists loosens in turn. 

“It was your voice?” she mutters. “It was your voice because...we’re...?”

He closes the gap between them, leans his forehead against hers. “I never should have let you go.”

Audrey’s tears spill over her lashes. “You never should have let me go.”

“Can you ever forgive me?”

Her breath hitches. She’s still broken, so hurt, in so many ways; he can see that now. He’s wearing the face of the man who’d hurt her in ways he can’t yet name and neither can she. He knows she has nightmares. He knows she needs counselling. She will be coming to grips with the world that passed her by as a result of being kept in  _ that place. By Him _ . 

And maybe that’s enough for her to not want him around, not within a thousand yards of wherever she stands. He wouldn’t fault her for that. He would willingly submit to the severest of punishments for the crimes committed in his stead, with his memories and loves and desires fueling that fire, if it meant she would get one iota of comfort from it. Because maybe that’s what it means to love wholly. Maybe that’s what soulmates really stand for. 

And maybe soulmates simply cease to matter when this much trauma fills the space between them. 

_ A quarter century, robbed from us both... _

He doesn’t want to wait a single day more. Not if he can help it. He doesn’t know what she’ll say, but whatever it is, he has to know. He has to try.

“We’re really...?” she asks, taking a shaky breath as she flattens her palms against his chest. He thinks if he stands there still enough he’ll be able to feel her heartbeat through her fingertips.

He nods. “Yes.”

She takes a breath. “I need time,” she says. “To heal.”

“I understand.” 

“I need space.”

“Of course.” His voice comes out tense, tight, high in his throat. He expects rejection, counts on it, and steels himself for the pain of it. It’s the least of what he deserves.

But she looks up at him and her eyes are clear and he doesn’t have to hold her gaze for long to see the traces of the woman he knew all those years ago, with her whole life ahead of her, before fate stepped in to deliver its crushing blow. She peers out at him from behind her pale blue eyes and he knows she’s in there still; if she’s in there, maybe he is too? 

Maybe there’s hope?

“I need you to never ever  _ stop _ talking to me,” she whispers. “Ever.”

And he sighs, relieved. 

“I promise, Audrey,” he whispers, because it’s all he can manage. 

So she kisses him instead, silence in her head to match the silence in his, silence that they’ll fill with words spoken aloud, because he’ll never stop talking, and he hopes she never will, either.


End file.
